The Turkish government’s obligations under international conventions have already begun to be questioned with this crackdown on Kurds, which is continuing unabated. In March 2017 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a damning report on the serious human rights and international law violations by Turkish security forces in Turkey’s Southeast.

The Kurdish political movement has come under intense pressure from the current government of autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is bent on marginalizing the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) with the help of a military crackdown and abuse of the criminal justice system.

Erdoğan, who has done away with on-and-off
initiatives to address Turkey’s longstanding Kurdish problem, has made deals
with nationalists, neo-nationalists and Islamists to persecute leaders, elected
local officials and members of the HDP, including Co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş
and Figen Yüksekdağ, who recently had to resign. The legitimate Kurdish
political movement has been sandwiched between a repressive regime on the one
hand and the commanders of the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has
grown uneasy with the electoral successes of the HDP in the 2015 general
elections, on the other.

Not only were decades-long grievances of the Kurds
in Turkey not addressed but also Kurds who wanted to present their demands on
political platforms and compete in local and national elections were deprived
of tools and venues to make their cases. More often than not, the criticism
from HDP politicians was described by Erdoğan and other government officials as
treachery, betrayal of the Turkish nation and serving the interests of
terrorist groups.

It has now become clear that the main reason for
the government hammering the HDP was the frustration on the part of President
Erdoğan in his failure to woo Kurdish voters and thus lose the majority in the
Turkish Parliament for the first time in their 13 years of rule in the June
2015 elections. Many Kurdish lawmakers were prosecuted, with some jailed;
elected local officials were sacked and/or imprisoned; and thousands of HDP
members and supporters were arrested and put in prison.

“Erdoğan wants to shore up his one-man rule without
any check on his absolute power, whether that challenge comes from the critical
media, opposition parties or civil society groups,” said Abdullah Bozkurt, president
of the Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF), an advocacy group that monitors
rights violations in Turkey. “The Kurdish opposition political movement
represents a major threat to his rule,” he added.

Not surprisingly, Turkey’s military incursion in Afrin
comes at a time when voter support for Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP) ahead of the 2019 general elections is plummeting. The
AKP government sees this operation as an opportunity to fan nationalist
euphoria and religious zealotry while creating a pretext to justify further
clamping down on the opposition, especially the Kurdish opposition. Already,
hundreds of critics including HDP politicians and members who opposed the
cross-border war have been branded as terrorists, with some arrested on dubious
charges.

In its report titled “Kurdish
Political Movement under Crackdown in Turkey: The Case of the HDP,” SCF gives a snapshot of what has happened since
February 2015, when HDP representatives and AKP ministers came together for the
last time to publicly discuss how to move forward in resolving the Kurdish
problem, coming up with a deal known as the Dolmabahçe Agreement. Erdoğan
torpedoed the agreement to win nationalists and launched a campaign of
stigmatizing, demonizing and marginalizing the most substantial Kurdish
political movement in Turkey.

SCF remains concerned that the Turkish military
intervention in Syria will further agitate and upset the Kurds of Turkey, who
were already suffocating from the relentless defamation by the Erdoğan
government. As more violence and destruction take place in Syria, where the
Kurds find themselves battling the Turkish military and its proxy the Free
Syrian Army (FSA), the more tension will be witnessed on Turkey’s domestic
front. This may lead to a new set of problems in Turkey on top of the lingering
issues that still remain unresolved. By cracking down on fundamental rights and
freedoms such as the right to free assembly, the right to freedom of
association and the right to freedom of speech and expression, the Erdoğan
government has been undermining the integrity and cohesiveness of the diverse
Turkish society.

The Turkish government’s obligations under
international conventions have already begun to be questioned with this
crackdown on Kurds, which is continuing unabated. In March 2017 the Office of
the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a damning report
on the serious human rights and international law violations by Turkish
security forces in Turkey’s Southeast. A month later, the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) placed Turkey under a formal monitoring
process when it found that Turkey had not fulfilled its obligations to the
Council of Europe (CoE). Calls are now being made for the UN Security Council
to intervene in Turkey’s incursion into Syria’s Afrin region.

SCF calls on the Turkish government to stop the crackdown on Kurds and resume talks with the legitimate representatives of the Kurdish political movement to address grievances and grant rights and freedoms that should not be subject to any negotiations in the first place. The violence must stop, the persecution of all critical, opposition and dissident groups must be halted and the overall democratic deficit of Turkey must be addressed so that the security and stability of the country with all the diversity and vibrancy of civil society can be restored.